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YANGON: Myanmar arrested 385 drug traffickers last month, state media said on Wednesday, as the world's second-largest opium producer sought to show it was cracking down on the narcotics trade.
The United Nations anti-drugs body has said opium production in Myanmar shot up 46 per cent from 2006 to 2007, but the military-ruled nation continues to insist that it is on track to be drugs-free by 2014.
"Action was taken against 385 persons – 317 men and 68 women in 236 cases," the junta-run New Light of Myanmar newspaper said.
Police, customs and the military also seized 105 kilograms (231 pounds) of opium, 1.6 kilograms of heroin, 138,550 stimulant tablets and smaller quantities of other narcotics and chemicals in July, it added.
Myanmar's mountainous and lawless border regions once hid swathes of poppy fields which fed most of the world's opium habit well into the 1990s.
Under pressure from governments including close ally China, Myanmar eventually began a campaign in the 1990s to eradicate the crop, and soon Afghanistan took its mantle as the world's top opium producer.
But after a few years of steep decline, opium production in Myanmar has risen once again.
A UN Office on Drugs and Crime report last year blamed high-level collusion and corruption for the rise, while activists across the border in Thailand say the crop substitution programmes for poor farmers have not been successful.
The military-ruled nation, meanwhile, has become a hub for methamphetamine production, with convoys of high-tech trucks ferrying chemicals and mobile laboratories under the cover of Myanmar's dense jungle, experts said.
- AFP/so
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